Regionalism and Uneven Development in Southern Africa: The Case of the Maputo Development Corridor

This volume advances our understanding of how Southern Africa is currently being reconfigured, critically examining what has been marketed as the "flagship" of the Spatial Development Initiative programme in Southern Africa: the Maputo Development Corridor (MDC). By examining a variety of cross-cutting levels of governance and development and by focusing on the nexus between the formal and informal processes that stake out the MDC, this volume contributes to a detailed understanding of what is perhaps the most important current experiment in regionalism in Africa. By engaging regional processes on the micro-level and "on the ground", there is a special emphasis on how local communities regard and respond to the Corridor initiative. All chapters in the volume are the result of extensive fieldwork in both Mozambique and South Africa, and the contributions are drawn from the region and beyond, including Botswana, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Sweden and the United States.

Endorsements:

"Readers seeking an innovative perspective on regionalism in southern Africa, combined with fresh data, could do no better than read Regionalism and Uneven Development in Southern Africa. No other book so skillfully uncovers regionalizing processes as they relate to neoliberal trends in the subcontinent." - Professor James H. Mittelman, American University, Washington, USA

"The new regionalism is a multifaceted phenomenon, still largely underresearched. This study provides an invaluable, empirically grounded, analysis of the formation of cross-border regionalization in Africa." - Professor Björn Hettne, Göteborg University, Sweden

"…this book represents a useful study and comes at a timely juncture in terms of new regional dynamics developing in the Southern Africa region." - International Planning Studies

"…criticism of the state-centred approaches in IR and IPE is theoretically and empirically convincing." - Modern African Studies